Epilogue
Nora
Jail isn’t so bad.
This is what I tell myself when I wake up here and remember what I did. And that it’s real.
Someday, it might even make a good story. Unassuming, quiet, mousy Nora Bellamy spent some time in the slammer for murder? It will shock the ladies at the Knit and Sip, I think. And everyone
else in Midas.
Because none of them know the real me. I’ve made sure of that. Or did Harrison make sure of that? It doesn’t matter right
at this moment. What matters is that if I learned anything from Lexi, I think it’s that I’d like to shock more people.
If, that is, I ever get out of here.
But I have to believe I will, I remind myself as I stare up at the dingy jail ceiling. I have to believe that Jack will take
Lexi to the site of the original demon deal and do what needs to be done to break that deal. She’s Amelia’s granddaughter.
She’s the harbinger.
She’s strong and brave and she can do this. I know she can.
That’s why I’m here.
She won’t end up like Cleo. She can’t.
My throat closes up at the thought of my best friend. The way I saw her in my dream. Crumpled like that at the bottom of the
wall, and nothing I could have done about it. And a text on my phone that I didn’t read until morning, telling me to check
on Virginia because she had to run out that night to “deal with a problem” and didn’t know if she’d be back before her grandmother
woke up.
“My God,” says a voice I know too well, but did not expect to hear again. It’s still a shock. “You’re going to make me cry.”
“You are letting this jail cell make you maudlin, young lady,” says another voice, but I’m used to her. She’s been with me since August. “I taught you better than to wallow.”
I turn my head and there they are. My ghosts. Amelia, the parental figure I never really had despite the ones who supposedly
held that title, wearing her typical handknit sweater—with exquisitely rendered cables—over her work overalls.
I screamed when I saw her the first time, a misty shadow of the Amelia I knew and loved. It took time to accept it, to learn
to expect her. More time to do more than see her—and even longer to actually hear her voice again.
I suppose at some point I just accepted I see ghosts. Considering the other things I can see, do, it’s not that big of a stretch.
Besides, everyone knows Midas is haunted.
But now there’s a new ghost, and I hate it.
Cleo. I can’t really see her. There’s a shimmer in the air in the direction of where I heard her voice. Kind of like the opposite
of Amelia . . . who I saw long before I heard her.
I don’t know why it’s different. I want to be grateful, relieved, happy, to have this instead of just never hearing or seeing them again.
Because it’s not the same as being alive and here, is it?
Last night I had a weird dream that I think was just a regular old anxiety dream, about everyone I know dying but staying
with me, just as ghosts.
The thought of losing anyone else is too much to bear, worse than staying in this loud, smelly, deliberately upsetting place,
and I have to blink back tears. Or Amelia will scold me about that, too.
Neither one of them likes to talk about the sacrifices they made, but I know it means something. I know it matters. That’s
why I made my own sacrifice. And I was right to do it. I know that, too.
Someone clears their throat and I look up. A guard is standing at my cell door—but so is someone else.
My heart trips over itself. It always has. It always will.
I am perfectly capable of admitting truths to myself, even if Logan Darling isn’t.
“Oh,” says Cleo, drawing the syllable out into a banquet of a meal. “So there really is a mystery guy after all. Damn. Can’t believe
I didn’t guess that.”
“Shut up,” I mutter, under my breath, but I can feel my cheeks flush.
The guard lets Logan in, but I realize this isn’t like his last visit, all lawyerly and mad at me for confessing. Mostly because
the guard leaves the door open and unlocked.
“You’re being released,” Logan tells me.
He doesn’t sound happy about this, which makes me wish I could hate him. I need to work on that.
But then he handles everything.
He gets my clothes back and leads me through getting changed, signing papers, and retrieving all my things. He leads me out
of the jail into the sunlight. Somewhere along the way Amelia and Cleo fade away.
They’ll fade back in at some point. In and out. Sad and wonderful all wrapped into one.
And while we’re doing all this, bits and pieces of the other dream I had last night come back to me the way they always do.
In a rush of snippets I have to stitch together later.
Lexi and Harrison in that clock tower. The horrible things Harrison told her. Logan and Jack at the rock and Lexi running
all that way, across the whole of Midas, to find them. The blood used to break the deal. The explosion.
I see it all, because I dreamed it all from my cell.
Harrison’s betrayal hurts, but it explains . . . so many things. I think it might take me years to fully unravel it all.
But if I’m honest, I find that losing him doesn’t hurt quite the way losing Betsy did. Losing my adoptive grandmother was
losing someone who loved me.
Deep down, I knew Harrison never did. Even if I did think he was good and right and helping us. I assumed there was something
wrong with me. After all, I’m a foundling, not a Bellamy.
As Harrison always told me when we were alone, I could have anyone’s blood. And he never meant that as a good thing.
I can’t think too much about it now, because I will wonder if it’s all my fault I didn’t say anything sooner. Would Amelia
and Cleo be alive today if they knew my doubts about the man everyone loved?
Logan ushers me to his rental car without much conversation, then drives us away from the jail. And not a moment too soon
for my tastes. I want to leave everything ugly back there. I want to drive toward something new and wonderful.
A life without demons, even if it means a life without some people I loved, too.
“Lexi needed to rest, or she and Jack would have come with me,” he tells me in his lawyer voice. “They should be at the diner this morning, though. I’ll take you there, unless you’d rather I drop you off at the knitting shop.”
“The diner will be fine,” I tell him evenly, clutching my hands together. I stare at the road, not sure I can look at him
and hold myself together.
“It should probably be Jack explaining, but I don’t want you to be blindsided. It was Harrison. He’d made his own . . . deal
with the devil, I guess you could say.”
“I saw it in my dream,” I tell him. “But tell me what happened from your perspective.”
He does, rehashing the events in quick, factual statements that belie no emotion. A Logan Darling specialty.
I watch the world go by as we head back to Midas. It’s a beautiful Halloween day. Bright and crisp. Everything feels lighter.
Right and wonderful.
I guess eradicating demons will do that for a town.
Tears prick my eyes, but I blink them back. It’s hard to believe it’s all over, but it’s not hard to believe Lexi and Logan
and Jack did just what they set out to do. And we all paid a horrible price in losing Cleo, and in seeing the truth about
Harrison.
But Amelia always told me that sacrifice is part of staying in the light, and I know Cleo believed that. I wish she could
be here—alive—to revel in it, but I know that refusing Harrison and dying because of it was in service to the light.
That’s who she was.
And who are you, Nora Bellamy, of anyone’s blood?
It seems like I need to find out.
Logan pulls his car into the only spot he can find. It’s about a block away from the diner and I can tell he’s considering
not walking with me. That’s fine. I don’t need him.
But before I can get out of the car, he speaks. And not like a lawyer for once.
“I’m going back to New York,” he tells me. “Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon. I have a job. A real life.”
He emphasizes the word real. He keeps his gaze on the road in front of him.
If I knew how to punch, I might hit him. Instead, I do my best version of a punch with my response. “I hope you have a lovely
time.”
He glares at me, but I push the car door open and step out into the perfect fall morning—especially perfect on this side of
those jail cell doors. I hear his door slam, like he’s out and following me, even though I know he wasn’t going to. Still,
I ignore him and head for the diner.
I can see that it’s packed, as always, when I approach. And my stomach rumbles because life goes on.
Whether I want it to or not.
The door flies open and then Lexi is there, practically slamming into me as she grabs me up in a hug. She’s talking a mile
a minute. Chastising me for taking her place, apologizing for Cleo and for Harrison. She laughs. She cries.
I laugh. I cry. My heart aches at the thought of Cleo never getting to see what this town of ours is like without demons.
“I can see it,” she tells me from beside me when I know she wasn’t there a moment ago. I hear that caustic laugh of hers.
“I see more than you do, Nora, but you’re not ready for that conversation.”
I kind of hope that someone else will hear her, but no one does. No one looks toward her voice. Lexi doesn’t say a thing about it.
Jack comes out, and we hug, too. Not normal for us, but if anything calls for a hug amongst cousins, it’s this.
“This never would have happened without you, Nora,” he tells me with that Jack Bellamy certainty I have come to rely on.
Logan stands off to the side. And that’s okay. I have this. Lexi and Jack. Time and space to mourn Cleo and Amelia—with their commentary, no doubt—and what Harrison was or became.
I don’t need Logan Darling in my town.
Because I know, when he leaves Midas, he’ll be right back where he’s always been my whole life.
In my head.